I think is it worthwhile to note that when I open my flashdrive, this problem does not happen.

This problem occurs with the latest Jaunty updates, specifically nautilus(-data) version 1:2.25.91-0ubuntu1, and originated with nautilus(-data) version 1:2.25.4-0ubuntu1. This problem does not occur with nautilus(-data) version 1:2.25.3-0ubuntu2.

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Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, you are not using the most recent version of this package for your Ubuntu release. Please upgrade to the most recent version and let us know if you are still having this issue. Thanks in advance.

Please re-test with Alpha 4 as it is now the current version. I won't close out the issue for now until we find it has been fixed in Alpha 4 or if it is still an issue.

I'm marking this as affecting the source package nautilus. After manually downgrading nautilus, nautilus-data, and libnautilus-extension to version 1:2.25.3-0ubuntu2 (available in the Jaunty archives from January 23 to February 2) and restarting X (logout and log back in), the problem disappeared.

Since I am not sure when this bug will be fixed, I am providing (as is, with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY) a simple shell script that will downgrade nautilus, nautilus-data, and libnautilus-extension to version 1:2.25.3-0ubuntu2. It downloads the old binary versions of those packages from Launchpad (this will not work when Launchpad removes those files from disk), forces their downgrade, and attempts to fix any unmet dependencies. Extract the script.tar.gz file, and run (in terminal) script32.sh or script64.sh, for Ubuntu 32-bit or 64-bit, respectively. Remember not to upgrade nautilus in the future until this bug is fixed.

could you stop commenting on this bug? the issue is well understood, it's due to the autorestart in the desktop file which trigger autorestarting from gnome-session when nautilus exit which it does immediatly when there is no background to draw and no dialog open which leads to the loop described there

This bug affected my Dell Dimension 4700, but did not manifest itself on a 3 year old HP Compaq.
I used the same Jaunty 9.04 Alpha 5 LIVE CD on both boxes. It may help to report your hardware, with respect to this bug.
Perhaps CMOS settings are relevant, such as PXE boot?

The autostart condition wasn't really successful because gnome-session still restarts it even when the condition isn't met. The real bug is that EggSMClient can't set the restartstyle hint after connecting to the session manager, which is how Nautilus used to work with GnomeClient in Intrepid.

I discussed this briefly with Sebastien on IRC yesterday, and the suggestion was that we should probably just completely disable Autorestart for Nautilus in Jaunty (which is what people have already been doing in this bug report to work around the issue).

One more thing, since this problem started yesterday, every reboot is immediately followed by an Update Information pop-up saying

"The language support files for your selected language seem to be incomplete. You can install the missing components by clicking on "Run this action now" and follow the instructions. An active internet connection is required. If you would like to do this at a later time, please use "System Settings -> Regional & Language" instead."

Choosing to run the action has no effect, choosing Next or Close kills the window. Any advice to kill it permanently? Is it a related problem or a new bug?

I still have this problem in version 1:2.28.0-0ubuntu2 of Nautilus, Linux version 2.6.31.11.22.
I saw a fix a few weeks ago, but the bug became active again. I don't know if it is still open or if it got closed

This is already so old and will occur everytime /usr/share/applications/nautilus,desktop is replaced. You have to edit it again and set autorestart=false. One of these days I will set it ro and see what happens during install :-D evil grin

I will confirm camper365's observation in #75; running the same versions.

As soon as I untick "/apps/nautilus/preferences/show desktop" in gconf-editor nautilus starts autospawning. I got tired of turning off the option in /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop and now just keep the Desktop view enabled.

And loose my cube? No way man. The faces of all those win loosere, gently switching from 1 face to the other and suddenly keeping ctrl-alt-arrow pressed and the cube spinning out of control on my little eee-pc netbook. On an intel card FGS. No way gnome is taking that fun from me.

Still happening for me on an up-to-date Karmic Koala Beta (Although setting AutostartCondition=GNOME /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop in /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop seems to do the trick...)

I have a few questions:
- this was patched in Ubuntu 9.04, any reason (other than time/manpower) why this isn't the case for 9.10 anymore?
- is it harmful in any way to chmod 444 /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop?

This is pretty much the only issue I've had with Ubuntu 9.10 so far that is "severe", if I did not have a core2quad, I would probably not have survived to ask about this :)

I have found no problems with setting nautilus.desktop as read-only. but I have found that after an update, the problem exists again (because it's run as root, the file can be edited whether it's read-only or not).
I have found that if I open a gnome-terminal (if you can get to it before nautilus takes all of your cpu) or go to a tty and type "killall nautilus" it will work. however, sometimes I have to continually press Up and Enter to get it to work (running the command just once doesn't always work).

the workaround has been dropped in karmic because if you keep workarounds it doesn't encourage people to work on the issue, the bug didn't worked though so we might want to apply it again now in karmic

> Well this has taken to long already I'm seriously thinking of replacing
> nautilus by Thunar. It's really ridiculous that a bug like this just
> persists. Unless gnome is protecting it's desktop.
>
> --
>

The issue is not trivial to fix and comments like that aren't particularly
helpful. Nautilus is currently a required component of the GNOME session
because it is needed for auto-mounting removable media. However, Nautilus is
currently designed to exit when it has nothing left to do (such as when it
is set to not draw the desktop), which contradicts the need for it to be a
required desktop component and doesn't make much sense.

So far, it doesn't seem like anyone here has come up with any proper
solutions. Either Nautilus should be designed to never exit, even when it
has nothing to do (such as drawing the desktop), or the media handling part
of Nautilus should move to some other desktop component and Nautilus should
not be a required component. Both ideas are non-trivial though, and require
someone with the time and interest in working on it.

You're more than welcome to make a contribution.

In the meantime, if you don't want to keep modifying nautilus.desktop after
every update, just remove nautilus from the list of required components in
your session

I'm not meaning to sound rude, but I have seen this bug fixed in previous versions, so I don't see why it has come back.
However, I do not know much about nautilus under the hood, so there could have been another bug fix that occurred in the newer versions that brought this bug back.
I am unable to see why the older versions can't be put into Karmic until this bug gets fixed.

I agree with Sebastien regarding the workaround because, unless you subscribed to this bug via e-mail, most people are going to forget about the bug in a week's time after the workaround is applied.

It's never been fixed properly. Instead, a workaround was applied in Jaunty to stop it respawning. That means that Nautilus just exits instead and means that you lose all media handling capabilities if you don't have Nautilus drawing the desktop.

@ Chris
Thats just the remark I would have expected from you. First of all I contributed by creating a bug report many moons ago. Then I kept adding info and educating people about a work around. All the time waiting patiently for a solution. Do you really think that I as a user give a you know what why it is hard to solve. We users are very simple people if it works we use it if it doesn't out of the window it goes. Wasn't that the point of that 'developer shut up strategy' to make that clear. I will have a look at the stand alone setup of compiz because I'm really fed up with this. Might help me cut some bloat added by Gnome over the last few months also.

I agree with Chris that a proper fix ought to be committed, rather than just another workaround. If nobody cares about the "show_desktop" option enough to fix it, maybe it should just be disabled (i.e. remove the gconf key, and just always show the desktop). Personally, losing this option would annoy me enough to make me finally dump the GNOME desktop altogether, but it's at least a solution, and it's better than just continuing to ship a broken Nautilus. The option is certainly useless in its currently broken state, so just disabling it shouldn't be much of a leap.

I certainly don't agree with you Brett, because the amount of posts in this bugreport clearly shows that there are quite a few people who use the feature... I agree though that the issue should be fixed properly.

could the users who get the issue give details on the reason why they turn off the background display? the new nautilus version used in karmic has a gconf key to not exit in such case, it would make sense to use that if users are trying to get a clean background or get something else to render it but not so much if the goal is to have nautilus not running

I don't want nautilus to draw the desktop because it doesn't give me a useful desktop context menu, or even any way to create a useful desktop context menu. And if it's drawing the desktop, it won't allow any other software to give me a desktop menu. So I just turn show_desktop off, and run xfdesktop instead (which gives me a context menu I can customize any way I want). I don't particularly care if Nautilus is running or not, as long as it's not sucking up too many resources. I just want a desktop menu I can control/customize.

The reason I turn off the nautilus desktop is to allow compiz to draw it, giving me a different background per workspace. However, if nautilus allowed a transparent desktop background (I have seen the ability to do this, but it requires a recompile, and I haven't taken the time to do it), then I would turn nautilus on.

The only reason why I turn off the nautilus desktop is that i don't like the desktop metaphor (whereas I like the Netbook Remix way for instance).
All my files are managed through a proper Nautilus window with a navigation toolbar and sort & display options.
Therefore i turn off the nautilus desktop to not have useless options like a contextual menu for creating folders on the desktop etc. Because i like consistency. I don't like having useless things. As you can see my reasons are essentially intellectual and for me i must admit that the bug is minor

I turn the desktop off for several reasons: 1) I don't need desktop icons. 2) As others already mentioned the context-menu which nautilus offers is completely useless (I remember that there used to be an entry to start a terminal at least, that was in GNOME 2.18 or something). 3) There is no way to get to the openbox context menu when the desktop is enabled. 4) I don't really care about nautilus at all, I just like the gnome-panel and other GNOME related stuff and therefore still use the gnome-session, but with openbox as window manager.

I turn off the desktop because ion3, which doesn't support EWMH, insists on managing the window. ion3 is a tiled window manager so (if you're using tiled desktops) there is no desktop for nautilus to draw.

* I practically only use nautilus to copy music files to my mp3 player.
* I'd like to have my home directory (not Desktop) as Desktop directory in nautilus, and I have to many files to fit on the screen.
* I don't do file handling in my home directory all that much, so why should I have a constantly open file manager that's not even full featured?
* It's easy to accidentally do bad stuff with your files.
* I prefer to use the places menu with bookmarks
* The applications I use have smarter ways to navigate to files relevant to the task. For example, Ryhtmbox lets you search thousands of music files. Eclipse lets you find any file in the current project by pressing a shortcut and type part of the filename.
* Icons on my pretty background image looks ugly.

* debian/patches/16_workaround_autorestart_issue.patch:
- set the autorestart key to false to workaround gnome-session respawning
nautilus again and again when not displaying the background (lp: #325973)

Perhaps it is too late to matter since it looks like disabling autorestart just got merged in but...

It seems to me that I was just now able to fix the problem by unchecking *both* show_desktop and exit_with_last_window in configuration editor (apps>nautilus>preferences).

I have my 3D cube working, no spinner, and no nautilus windows open. Looking at my processes I see that I have a nicely cooperating nautilus process with an insignificant amount of CPU usage. The autorestart patch has not yet made it to my computer and I can still switch back and forth between proper behaviour and having the spinner and CPU hogging auto-restarts.

So an alternative fix would be to alter configuration editor to either suggest or automatically uncheck exit_with_last_window if show_desktop is unchecked. Another approach would be to check and correct the settings in a startup script.

> the new nautilus version used in karmic
> has a gconf key to not exit in such case, it would make sense to use
> that if users are trying to get a clean background

Would work in my personal case, according to your description... I that,
according to replies from other users in this thread, I'm not alone in
this use case, but there are some more "fancy" approaches.

But then it seems this has already been patched by the time I'm writing
this, so I'll just wait for the package updates.

If you want show_desktop off then set exit_with_last_window to false. Disabling the auto-restart will mean you lose volume automounting and anything else handled by nautilus, by turning off show_desktop.

I would suggest that a better fix for this bug would be to make exit_with_last_window default to false.

Fallen victim to his bug on Natty. Interestingly, I only get it when I try to run a dual-monitor. This happens on both Unity and "Classic." Unplugged monitor, reset X, turned show_desktop back on, and every thing worked fine.